Pro-choice Catholic Is Automatically Ex`d

March 21, 1986|By Ellen Goodman, Washington Post Writers Group.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — If you ask Mary Ann Sorrentino what her religion is, she will still answer, ``Catholic.`` Like her parents and their parents before them, she was born, raised and educated in the Catholic Church.

``For an Italian-American woman, this is part of who I am,`` says the 42- year-old woman. ``So when you announce to me--zap--you`re not Catholic anymore, it`s almost laughable. It`s like saying you`re not Italian anymore.`` But that, in fact, is what has happened. Mary Ann Sorrentino, the executive director of Planned Parenthood for Rhode Island has been

excommunicated or, rather, ``self-excommunicated`` for her work supporting abortion.

The story began last May, 48 hours before her daughter Louisa`s confirmation, when the priest called her family in for an interrogation. He insisted that the 15-year-old girl disavow her mother`s pro-choice stand before she could be confirmed. At the same searing interview, the priest informed Mary Ann that she was no longer a Catholic.

Then, in January, a priest announced this excommunication publicly, in a radio broadcast advertised in the Providence Journal this way: ``Can Rhode Island`s leading advocate of abortion rights really be a Catholic?`` The answer, listeners were told, was no. Mary Ann Sorrentino had violated a canon of church law that states, ``A person who procures a completed abortion incurs an automatic excommunication.``

Today, wearing her notoriety with humor and a well-honed sense of irony, Sorrentino says, ``Until then, I didn`t even know that each of us had this self-destruct mechanism.``

But if, in fact, Mary Ann Sorrentino self-destructed, if any

``accomplice`` to abortion is automatically out, it would appear that she has a lot of company. ``If you take every Catholic woman who ever gave another woman $10 to help get an abortion,`` she says, ``every husband who knew, every doctor, every nurse, every politician who voted for choice . . . well, there`s a lot of self-excommunicants in my church.``

Sorrentino was not unaware of the church hierarchy`s attitude toward her job or toward those who are publicly seen as pro-choice and Catholic. ``I knew I was not doing the bishop`s favorite work,`` she admits. She had watched the hierarchy come down on another Italian woman, Geraldine Ferraro. But it only gradually became clear to her and others how far church conservatives are willing to go to ``purify`` the church of dissent.

The crackdown on disagreement about the abortion issue has been felt by those who signed two newspaper ads talking about the ``diversity of opinion`` about abortion among Catholics. It has been felt by theologians, such as Marquette University`s Dan Maguire, whose lectures at four Catholic universities were canceled. (Only one, Boston College, invited him back.)

The issue is abortion, but at a deeper level the central issue is one of

``real Catholics.`` Can you disagree with the church and still belong, be a

``real Catholic``? Can you disagree on abortion? Can you, like the beleaguered moral theologian Charles Curran of Catholic University, disagree on birth control? Can you disagree on divorce?

To conservatives, it is a matter of order: The Church, Obey It or Leave It. The rules are clear, they say, and if you cannot follow them, you are not a member. You are, in effect, an outlaw. People have no right to call themselves Catholic if they oppose what the bishops teach.

Sorrentino doesn`t see it that way: ``People say, if you don`t like the rules, why don`t you switch to another church? The same people, if you asked them whether you should leave an unhappy marriage, would tell you to stay and try to work things out.``

To theologian Dan Maguire, ``The church is not a Kiwanis Club or the National Football League, where you play by the rules or leave. There is another concept of the church as a group of believers who are struggling together and with others to discern the will of God. We recognize that this is a chancy process. We may miss the signals. But in a more humble, questing church, we don`t throw people out.``

Mary Ann Sorrentino was thrown out. Now Judie Brown, the president of the American Life League, has asked the Roman Catholic Church to throw out Eleanor Smeal, the head of the National Organization for Women.

I doubt that the Catholic Church has the taste for mass excommunication, even mass ``self-excommunication.`` There are enough Catholics who have

``fallen away.`` But these are increasingly tense times for those who believe in the Catholic Church and in free choice.